• Champions expected to make an approach for forward

• Fee could be around £100m for Villa’s England player

Arsenal are expected to make an approach to sign Morgan Rogers from Aston Villa after making the England forward their primary transfer target this summer.

The Premier League champions want to strengthen Mikel Arteta’s squad and are hopeful of bringing Rogers to north London, although he could cost up to £100m.

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After two forgettable seasons, the Game of Thrones prequel finally comes into its own – blazing back on to our screens with the most epic dragon-based smackdown imaginable. Fans can breathe a fiery sigh of relief!

Ah yes, House of the Dragon! Unlikely as it is that a megabucks Game of Thrones prequel with a blue-chip cast could be forgettable, in its first two seasons HotD did not help itself, with the first either killing off its best characters too soon or recasting them to accommodate bewildering time jumps, and the second building and building to nothing. It returns for a third run without much wind in its dragon wings.

Breathe a fiery sigh of relief, then, at the news that this show has found its focus. The start of season three is a fine epic, balancing big battles with sharp two-hander scenes where dominance shifts and fatal personality flaws are forced out. Add the odd new face and a blast of comic relief here and there and you have proper Thrones.

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Barrister who was given material produced by Garfield AI says advocacy at trial ‘remained fundamentally human’

An artificial intelligence law firm has won a case in an English court, in what is believed to be the first time a trial has been won using an AI lawyer.

A freelance HR consultant, Tamires Camal Taquidir, paid the firm, Garfield AI, about £400 to send a legal letter and then issue court proceedings over an unpaid debt of £7,000.

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El Gran Silencio

An Emotional Fish

Pet Shop Boys

Low

Valve's new Steam Machine will launch June 29 starting at $1,049 and go up from there depending on the configuration. Although it costs considerably more than the PS5 ($599.99) and Xbox Series X ($649.99), "the value proposition for the Steam Machine is that it can play your library of Steam games you may have accumulated over years (or even decades), rather than just PlayStation games, and it's also a full Linux PC that you can customize to your heart's content," reports The Verge. "Valve also says that it's selling the Steam Machine for the cost of its components alone instead of subsidizing the price." From the report: You can now register your interest to buy a Steam Machine as part of a reservation system. To offer a fair playing field for people who want to buy one, Valve will randomize everyone in the queue on Thursday at 1PM ET. After that, anyone who registers their interest will be added to the end of the waitlist. The first emails giving people the opportunity to buy will go out on June 29th.

Valve will sell four configurations of the Steam Machine:

- A 512GB model for $1,049
- A 512GB model with a bundled Steam Controller for $1,128
- A 2TB model for $1,349
- A 2TB model with a bundled Steam Controller for $1,428

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

De visa gelden voor de duur van één dag en zijn enkel geldig op Belgisch grondgebied. De Europese Commissie wil met de Taliban onderhandelen over het eventueel uitzetten van Afghaanse asielzoekers naar Afghanistan.

Never mind the fact that datacenter environmental concerns have come under growing scrutiny across the United States. Microsoft has just inked a deal with fossil fuel giant Chevron to supply one of the largest single-capacity additions to its datacenter fleet with 2.67 gigawatts of natural gas power for a full two decades. Chevron said today that it signed a two-decade power purchase agreement with Microsoft through its subsidiary Energy Forge One to supply 2.67 GW of power for a new datacenter project in West Texas dubbed Project Kilby. The natural gas turbines to be constructed on the datacenter’s site will sit behind-the-meter (Microsoft gets access to the power without it flowing through the grid first) and will be “among the largest co-located natural gas power and data center developments in the U.S.,” according to Chevron. Microsoft’s own press release on the matter, which doesn’t mention Chevron or Energy Forge One by name but does admit the new facility “will operate with a co-located natural gas power facility,” identified Pecos as the West Texas location where the bit barn will be built. The self-proclaimed birthplace of the rodeo is also a West Texas hub for agriculture and ranching, among other Texas-sized industries. Microsoft confirmed to The Register that, despite it not mentioning Chevron in the announcement, the power purchase agreement does concern the Pecos facility. The facility will be “one of the largest single-capacity additions” to Microsoft’s datacenter fleet “in our history,” according to Redmond’s release, and the company is trying hard to lean into its desire to be a good neighbor to the people of Pecos as it spends the next few years building the massive facility. Shouldn’t good neighbors care about air and water quality? “We know that being a good neighbor isn’t something you say,” Microsoft wrote in an open letter to the people of Pecos alongside its announcement of the new datacenter. “It’s something you prove over time.” That letter and the announcement take pains to point out all the good things Microsoft has done for the communities where it plunked down massive datacenters, and it wants the locals to know that the Pecos facility will be no different. Why, the very fact it’s building multiple gigawatts of natural gas power for itself proves just that! Building its own energy infrastructure, says Microsoft, will prevent locals from having to pay more for power. Additionally, the company anticipates eventually connecting its turbines to the grid and serving as a broader energy source, too. According to Chevron, the turbines being deployed for the Pecos datacenter include noise and light impact mitigations as well as “selective catalytic reduction” systems that reduce nitrogen oxide emissions. Not eliminate, mind you - just reduce. To get an idea of the scale of what Microsoft is planning to deploy with Chevron in Pecos, let’s consider the gas turbine generators that xAI’s Colossus AI datacenter installed in Memphis, Tennessee. That facility saw the installation of just 150 megawatts of gas turbines - roughly one eighteenth the size of Microsoft’s planned Pecos gas plant. Even at that small a scale, the xAI datacenter has still become the subject of a lawsuit [PDF] alleging that the facility is belching way too much smog into local communities for the air to be healthy and calling for it to be shut down. Emissions mitigations or not, one can't imagine the prairie sky around the Pecos datacenter will be as clear and high as it once was after the facility is completed. It’s worth pointing out that some of the turbines being deployed to Pecos will be manufactured by the deceptively named Solar Turbines, which actually builds gas power systems. According to reports and photographs out of the xAI Memphis facility, Solar Turbines also supplied gas turbines for Colossus. Then there’s the water concerns: Microsoft and Chevron both called attention to their plans to minimize water usage in Pecos, which lies in a part of Texas prone to drought and with limited access to fresh, potable water. “We are also designing our operations to minimize reliance on freshwater sources by utilizing nonpotable water where possible,” Microsoft noted. The company will rely on closed-loop cooling systems that will “significantly reduce water requirements.” As for the gas plant planned for the site, Chevron said that its facility will use “non-potable, brackish groundwater sources for power plant operations” instead of freshwater, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. Brackish groundwater, located in massive, salty, underground aquifers, is a major source of water for dry, dusty West Texas, and has been for some time. Desalination of brackish groundwater has been suggested [PDF] as a source of drinking water for the town and the surrounding region, raising questions about whether datacenters and gas power plants sucking it up to cool their jets are sustainable. Microsoft didn’t want to answer any of the questions we put to it aside from confirming Chevron’s press release related to the Pecos datacenter; Chevron didn’t respond. ®

Cloudflare on Monday said that it has joined with the three leading commercial browser makers to create a privacy-preserving protocol that websites can use to separate desirable web traffic from undesirable network requests. Cloudflare, along with Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox, have committed to develop Private Access Control Tokens (PACTs), a way for websites to generate a digital token that asserts a given browsing session is being run by a human or bot with legitimate intent, as opposed to network requests from people or software deemed abusive or improper. PACTs will let websites "with strong knowledge of 'personhood'" issue anonymous tokens that browser users and designated bots can present at other websites, so that fewer identity checks are necessary. Think of PACTs as a shareable, privacy-preserving CAPTCHA test result, where the desirability of the web traffic is being tested rather than whether the visitor is a human or bot – an increasingly difficult distinction. While the technical details are still being hammered out and harmonized between related proposals, it isn't immediately clear what constitutes "strong knowledge of 'personhood'" in this context, particularly since "personhood" appears to extend to software that has been authorized to act on behalf of a legitimate person for an authorized purpose. It may be that the test criteria puts certain browsers, behaviors, or network signals at greater risk of being denied the dispensation of a PACT, though past technical discussion by developers from Google and Mozilla suggests that excluding certain hardware, platforms, or user-agents is not a goal. Dane Knecht, CTO of Cloudflare, argues that the way people interact with the web is changing and increasingly may involve autonomous agents. "As AI-powered traffic becomes widespread, existing tools to support its use are too generic and coarse," said Knecht in a statement. "Now this collaboration lets us eliminate the friction caused by security protocols for every visitor – whether they are human or agent – without sacrificing privacy." The claim "without sacrificing privacy" is a bit of an overstatement. PACT tokens, it appears, will not contain personal details. But they won't do anything to repair all the other ways browsers can facilitate digital fingerprinting and tracking. And if implemented poorly, they may introduce novel risks. Fundamentally, they divide the internet traffic into welcome and unwelcome traffic – something already widely done through firewalls and other technical measures but not easily reconciled with the notionally open web. "Mozilla is committed to defending openness and user privacy on the web," said Bobby Holley, CTO for Firefox at Mozilla, in a statement. "An avalanche of automated traffic is pushing sites to adopt blunt defenses – paywalls, identity checks, CAPTCHAs, and invasive tracking – simply to tell whether a request comes from a human." While Cloudflare touts the privacy benefits of PACTs, it's clear from the company's announcement that the technology is designed to "empower businesses to identify genuine visitors, ensuring they can focus their resources on the traffic that matters to them." Essentially, this is an anti-fraud initiative. Many website operators have complained about the burden of handling unwanted network traffic from disrespectful crawlers. PACTs may be the answer to their prayers. At the same time, they may also become an access barrier that demands negotiation with site publishers to have one's site visits or software deemed worthy of "personhood." ®

NEW YORK (ANP) - Wall Street is maandag overwegend lager gesloten. Stevige verliezen bij grote technologiebedrijven, waaronder SpaceX, overschaduwden het optimisme over de voortgang van de vredesgesprekken tussen de Verenigde Staten en Iran.

De S&P 500, de index van 500 grote beursgenoteerde ondernemingen, eindigde 0,4 procent lager op 7472,79 punten. Technologiegraadmeter Nasdaq zakte 1,3 procent tot 26.166,60 punten. De Dow-Jonesindex ging wel omhoog. De beursgraadmeter van de dertig grootste Amerikaanse bedrijven won 0,3 procent op 51.712,71 punten.

Beleggers op Wall Street keerden maandag terug van een lang weekend, want vrijdag waren de Amerikaanse beurzen dicht voor Juneteenth, waarbij de afschaffing van de slavernij in de Verenigde Staten wordt herdacht.

SpaceX

Bij de techbedrijven kreeg SpaceX een koersverlies voor de kiezen van 16,4 procent. Vorige week donderdag en woensdag daalde de koers van het ruimtevaart- en AI-bedrijf van Elon Musk ook al, na de succesvolle beursgang op vrijdag 12 juni. Bij die beursgang haalde SpaceX 75 miljard dollar op. Daarmee was het de grootste beursgang ooit. Het aandeel staat nog altijd ongeveer 15 procent hoger vergeleken met de introductiekoers van 135 dollar per aandeel.

Alphabet, het moederbedrijf van Google, viel op met een koersverlies van ruim 5 procent. Dat had te maken met zorgen onder beleggers over de hoge investeringen in de techsector en of die voldoende rendement zullen opleveren. Daarnaast zijn in de afgelopen dagen twee prominente onderzoekers van Alphabet vertrokken naar concurrenten.

Ontstekingsremmers

Micron Technology (plus 6,8 procent) was wel gewild in de techsector. De koersstijging kwam in aanloop naar het kwartaalrapport van de chipfabrikant, dat woensdag na sluiting van de beurs wordt gepubliceerd.

Biotechnoloog Apogee Therapeutics viel op met een liefst 47 procent hogere koers. Het bedrijf wordt voor bijna 11 miljard dollar overgenomen door farmaceut AbbVie. Zakenkrant Financial Times had vrijdag al gemeld dat die overname naderde. Met de deal versterkt AbbVie zijn activiteiten op het gebied van ontstekingsremmers. Het Amerikaanse Apogee werkt aan middelen tegen onder meer eczeem.

De leverancier van bouwmaterialen Arcosa won 6,8 procent. Het bedrijf wordt overgenomen door branchegenoot CRH in een deal ter waarde van 8,5 miljard dollar.

HILVERSUM (ANP) - Jan-Willem Roodbeen en Jeroen Kijk in de Vegte nemen na acht jaar afscheid van Radio 2 en stappen over naar Radio 10. Vanaf 1 september nemen de radiomakers met een nieuw programma de ochtendshow over van Gordon en Froukje de Both, maakt Talpa maandag bekend. Daarnaast wordt Roodbeen benoemd tot radio director van Radio 10.

Roodbeen laat in een verklaring weten dat de overstap voelt als een "mooie volgende fase". Roodbeen en Kijk in de Vegte zijn op 24 juli, de slotdag van de Nijmeegse Vierdaagse, te horen met hun laatste uitzending voor BNNVARA.

Dave Minneboo, managing director creative Talpa audio, uit zijn waardering aan Gordon en De Both, die sinds september vorig jaar de ochtendshow verzorgden. "We danken Gordon & Froukje en het team voor hun inzet en betrokkenheid het afgelopen jaar en we verwelkomen een nieuwe ochtendshow met Jan-Willem en Jeroen."

Gordon gaf onlangs in een interview op Radio Veronica aan dat hij twijfelde of hij met de show door wilde gaan.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

handwritten on slide, "Death Valley, Feb 2000"

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

A long oral history of Steven Spielberg and his career. “He’s a terrific collaborator. He himself is a continuous lightbulb flickering on and off with one idea after another, but he’s not terribly protective of an idea.”

T.Marko has added a photo to the pool:

A small street-side eatery glows against the darkness, offering warmth, routine, and quiet refuge. Beneath a bright sign and handwritten menu, two figures exist in parallel solitude—one absorbed in his meal, the other leaning into the counter, caught in a moment of pause. The scene unfolds like a still frame from a film, where nothing dramatic happens, yet everything is felt: the contrast of light and shadow, presence and absence, movement and stillness. A fleeting glimpse into the quiet rhythm of the night.

Storm rising, Franz Sedlacek